Summer vacation will soon be rearing its unbearably hot temperatured head again. Summer vacation usually means freedom for most students who have been stuck in a classroom for the last eight months. No homework, no lectures, no having to drop $200 on a textbook. There’s just days spent lounging in the pool or on the beach, concerts with your best friends and plenty of free time to mentally prepare for the fall semester. But for the upcoming college graduates of 2016, summer vacation means something new entirely. Here’s a more realistic list of what the new college graduate will be doing this summer.
1. Sleep
No more waking up for that 8am class ever again. You hated setting an alarm for 7:30am the night before, hitting snooze three different times in the morning when it went off, leaving yourself only 10 minutes to get up, brush your teeth, and look halfway decent before running to class. Now you get to look down at you phone and see “No Alarms” because you’re sleeping in.
2. Make your own food
If you weren’t one of those lucky college students who got to move off campus and live in an apartment, being able to move back home after graduation and make your own food is a privilege you forgot you had. Living off of dining hall food for four years is definitely not one of the luxuries of college and if you never had to hear the word Aramark ever again, you wouldn’t be that upset about it.
3. Unpack
This is it. The final unpacking session of your college career. You don’t know how to prepare yourself, because you usually keep the dishes and laundry detergent in a tote. You keep the winter clothes packed away too, because you know you don’t need it for the first few months of fall semester so you hold off until winter break. And the binders you’ve been reusing year after year no longer have a purpose. Before you wouldn’t really unpack, you would just move things from the car to the spare room or the basement, where it will stay for three months before the next semester started up. But this time there is no next semester and everything needs to be unpacked, for real.
4. See your “at home” friends.
You talk to them from time-to-time while you’re away at college; they have their own day-to-day life and you have yours. They’re no longer your best friends from home; they’re the best friends you get to spend more time with now that you’re home for good. Hopefully neither of you will get sick of the other with the amount of time you get to spend with them.
5. Re-organizing life priorities
Now that you’ve graduated and you’re back at home, you have to get new priorities in check. Rather than making sure you write a paper or get to work on time, you make sure to remember to put the dog outside. Instead of planning a time to go to the dining hall with your friends, you throw a piece of frozen pizza into the microwave. Yeah, priorities.
6. Getting an “adult” job.
Say goodbye to the camp counselor and lifeguard positions. Time to put that degree to good use. LinkedIn and indeed.com are your new best friends.
7. Cry over arrival of diploma
After successfully walking across the stage without tripping or falling, you’re not handed your actual diploma. No, you get an empty booklet that you take when your name is called (hopefully pronounced correctly) and pose for a picture like you’re holding your whole college life’s work in your hand when you know the thing is empty. But then, months later after that day, it arrives at your home. You don’t know what to do at first. You cry for a little bit because the arrival of that piece of paper you worked your ass off for four years for is finally in your possession. And then you hang it in the diploma frame your parents bought you and you think . . . now what?
8. Panic over impending college debt
This is it. This is what four years of gradually increased college debt has boiled down to. The six-month grace period is ticking down and you still haven’t applied to nearly as many jobs as you probably should have while you were still in college.
9. Feel guilty when you have an ounce of fun instead of focusing on #6 and #8
Don’t have fun until #6 and #8 are completed. You’ll probably hate yourself.
10. Miss college life
Though the final papers have been handed in and you no longer have to stick to a college regime ever again, you’re always going to miss it. Weeks after graduation, you’ll be thinking of movie nights and family dinners with your groups of friends. Margarita Wednesdays and 68 cent wings on Mondays at the bar will always be in the back of your mind. You’ll even miss the mandatory hall meetings you used to attend when you lived in the dorms. But at least you’ll always have the memories.
